The Russian Orthodox Church has fused with its nuclear weapons complex, and in a religious conflict all bets are off.
The world is probably closer to nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, but you wouldn’t know that from current news coverage. Back in late February, when Russian President Vladimir Putin started his all-out invasion of Ukraine, fears of a nuclear conflagration surged, as Google Trends shows below. Polls of Europeans and Americans alike showed high levels of concern about a possible global nightmare. Now, we seem to have collectively gone back to sleep. But we may be in for a very rude awakening.
Wednesday, Putin gave a major speech on the war, announcing that he would call up 300,000 reservists to bolster the Russian army in the wake of recent Ukrainian gains on the battlefield. He also said, in a clear reference to his nuclear arsenal, “In the face of a threat to the territorial integrity of our country, to protect Russia and our people, we will certainly use all the means at our disposal,” adding, “This is not a bluff. I will emphasize this again: with all the means at our disposal.”
As I wrote here back in March — “Time to Start Worrying About the Bomb (Again)” — Russia, like the United States, has never ruled out the first use of nuclear weapons in a conflict. And it has a specific doctrine called “escalate to de-escalate” that envisions using a small number of nukes on the battlefield in order to shock an opponent into surrender or at least to freeze a war to its advantage. Russia has articulated this doctrine a number of times since it was first publicly stated in 2000, saying that it reserves the right to use nuclear weapons “in response to the use of nuclear and other types of weapons of mass destruction against it and (or) its allies, as well as in response to large-scale aggression utilizing conventional weapons in situations critical to the national security of the Russian Federation and its allies.” In 2009, the head of the Russian National Security Council clarified that this wasn’t just the country’s posture toward its global adversaries, but could also be for resisting aggression from “conventional forces…in regional or even a local [war].”
Now Putin has added a new wrinkle, stating that a threat to Russian “territorial integrity” could lead to him pressing the button. Since he is also now running a hastily organized referenda in four provinces that Russia has occupied since invading Ukraine in February, this creates some real ambiguity: if Ukraine manages to take back more of the lands it has lost since the February invasion, let alone any of the Crimean territory Russian annexed in 2014, might Putin turn to nuclear terror?
One of the scariest books I read this year is called Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy: Religion, Politics, Strategy. Its author, Dmitry Adamsky, teaches strategy and decision making at Israel’s Reichman University and also advises the Israeli Ministry of Defense. The book is so scary that I could barely get myself to finish it. That’s because it explains the rise of an unholy alliance between the Russian Orthodox Church and the country’s nuclear weapons complex.
Starting in the late 1980s, as the Soviet Union collapsed, these two forces reached out toward each other and made common cause — the nuclear weapons czars desperate for help fighting to maintain their central role in the country’s national security system against rising public interest in disarmament, and conservative churchmen eager to restore their centrality in the national identity after decades of official disdain for religion. The two are now wedded at the hip. As Adamsky writes: “each leg of the nuclear triad has its patron saint…the military clergy provide regular pastoral care to the nuclear corps’ servicemen…the nuclear priesthood and commanders jointly celebrate religious and professional holidays….Mobile temples accompany intercontinental ballistic missiles, and nuclear-armed submarines have their portable churches. Within the Russian military, in particular within the nuclear forces, the scope and frequency of clerical activities fostering patriotism, morale, and human reliability have made the priests almost equivalent to Soviet-era political officers.”
Wars infused with religious fervor are the worst kind of wars. While Clausewitz wrote that war was the continuation of politics by other means, when decision-makers see the world in religious terms they often make terrible mistakes. Furthermore, when they frame conflicts in religious terms, the zeal they stoke in their own public can make it harder to climb down from threats and more likely for conflicts to intensify.
The Russian Orthodox Church is a key bulwark of Putin’s rule, and in recent years he has also moved in its direction, becoming more explicitly religious and mystical in his own pronouncements and writings. Its primate, Patriarch Kirill, is a major supporter of Putin’s war and, like the Russian President, situates it inside a larger battle against Western values that he believes threatens the heart of the Russian nation. This past March, he gave a maniacal sermon attacking the West for “the suppression and extermination of people in the Donbas” region of Ukraine because they had refused to hold gay pride parades. The fact that Kirill’s minions now tend to the hearts and souls of Russian weapon masters should make your blood run cold.
Adamsky writes that “the Russian nuclear clergy is less likely to restrain conflict. It might even ensure a relatively easier path to escalation, by legitimizing a belligerent political course.” And even more chilling, he warns that Russia’s nuclear priesthood might made it harder for officers on the battlefield to disregard an order to use nukes. “One could argue that when it comes to ordering nuclear battlefield use, under the influence of the [Russian Orthodox Church], strategists and operators will more easily overcome moral and ethical self-restraint and execute missions exactly as ordered.”
Speaking yesterday to Amos Harel of Ha’aretz, one of Israel’s top newspapers, Adamsky was clearly very worried about Putin’s latest statements and particularly his decision these annexation referenda. “No one in the world will recognize the annexation of the conquered regions to Russia, but from Putin’s viewpoint, the referendum will help him formulate a narrative,” he said. “According to the Russian doctrine, nuclear weapons can be used when there is a threat to the integrity of Russian territory or to its sovereignty. From his point of view, the continuation of the war in these regions, amid the use of Western weapons, as well as systems and training supplied by NATO countries to Ukraine, creates a new situation once these regions are coopted to Russia. By means of the nuclear threat, he hopes he will be able to deter Kyiv and its supporters in the West from continuing to fight, and to strive for a ceasefire along the present line.”
Adamsky thinks the next few days or weeks will be critical, because Ukraine may make more gains on the ground before the newly conscripted Russian reserves called up by Putin can be trained and deployed. “I still think it’s low probability, but even so, we are at the closest point to the nuclear danger zone since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. We have entered a space in which the Russian nuclear system is in a state of strategic instability. That is what worries me most,” Adamsky told Ha’Aretz. “In Western eyes, there is no logic for Putin to use nuclear weapons, but that same Western logic did not foresee the Russian invasion of Ukraine last February.”
If Russia breaks the nuclear taboo that has held since 1945, all bets are off. Let’s face it: we’re not prepared in any way for how the sudden use of nukes will panic the public. President Biden will be under intense pressure to respond in kind. World markets will take a dive. Public confidence will shrivel. Rising fear may make populist outsiders, like Trump’s MAGA Republicans, more popular, just in time for the crucial midterm elections.
If I was religious, I would say, let’s pray that Putin is just bluffing. God help us if he’s not.